Canning is Back or Who Put the Tomatoes in the Ball Jar?

by Suzanne Poor

Candide and Voltaire notwithstanding, sometimes the best place to be is in the garden where nature works her miracles, unencumbered by terror, fear and political calamities. But only sometimes. Last year the strawberries and tomatoes were undone by heavy spring rains. This summer, a mysterious creature invaded the space and consumed all the broccoli shoots, then devoured the second round of green bean seeds.

Nonetheless there were some pluses — the tomatoes grew and grew and grew with no blemishes, no horde of insects, no blight. Although the plants were supported by those metal spiral holders, they got so heavy with fruit, they fell down anyway and had to be staked. An old legend has it that the good garden will produce red tomatoes by July 4. Well we had hundreds of green ones by then, but two weeks later the onslaught of heat and sunshine began the color change. Roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes filled the colanders to overflowing. We use no fertilizer — only a little bone meal and a lot of composted kitchen residue. We were inundated.

Freezing doesn’t work
In past years, we’ve gone the easy route, cooked the tomatoes and then froze the sauce. But by the time we were ready to use the blend, the mix had turned to icy flakes. And so this year, I decided to can the whole crop of Romas as they ripened. Although I watched my mother can vegetables years ago, I’d never had the courage to tackle that traditional home exercise — always afraid the jars would blow up in the pantry or that we’d die of botulism poisoning.

But the time had come. And here’s what happened. First of all you have to have the proper equipment, which took an entire Saturday afternoon to assemble. Quart mason jars, a canning pot tall enough to cover the 7"-tall jars with 2" of water. Another pot of boiling water to blanch the fruit so the skin will peel of easily, a sieve-like container to hold the tomatoes while they’re being blanched, still another pot of cold water to stop the blanching, a pair of canning tongs to pull the 212° jars out of boiling water, myriad pot holders. None of these things were regular items in my kitchen, other than the pot holders, but even then I didn’t have enough. Total cost: about $150. And this didn’t count my time.

Daddy was a marketing man
Ironically, my father, a marketing/sales executive, completed his long career in charge of the manufacture and marketing for Ball Brothers Glass Company. His territory was the half of the country west of the Mississippi. Mason Jars were one of his products.
When one considers that a large can of Roma tomatoes is about $1.79 in the super market, I figured I’d have to put up about 84 quarts. A daunting task. I could autograph the filled jars and sell them — like Bill Clinton did for his book My Life — for $400 at a Chapaqua book store near his home. But who’d buy even one? Then again, who bought Clinton’s book for that much when it’s selling at 30% off at Borders?

Over that weekend, I canned the ripe Romas after washing them, blanching them, peeling and destemming them, arranging them compactly in the jars, sealing the lids and boiling them for 45 minutes in the new All-Clad triple-duty, 12-quart pot. When the jars cooled, we tapped the lids as per the instructions in the Joy of Cooking, a 1975 ShopRite canning instruction book and the bottom of the Ball Jar box.

The best of all possible worlds
The result? Quarts and quarts of canned tomatoes. The seals held and the pinging on the tops of the lids sounded right. But just in case, we made spaghetti sauce the next night. It was the best I’d ever tasted.

The lesson? In this age of seeking important values, there is indeed merit in revisiting old ways. Whether it be taste, satisfaction at having not succumbed to botulism poisoning and remained among the living, the freshness of the fruit or knowing that in the end, cultivating one’s garden “keeps away boredom, vice and need” made it all worthwhile.

return to September 2004 AdTalk